The support of the US is the only thing keeping the simmering border conflicts from breaking out into open war.
I mostly agree but I'm sure Israel's demonstrably-competent military and accompanying nuclear arsenal must weigh into the decision somewhere. Israel has been involved in a number of local conflicts that the US simply wasn't present for. I seem to recall them holding their own pretty successfully and even bloodying the collective noses of invading forces for good measure.
(not trying to imply any support or otherwise for Israel)
'cause these loonies take the shit about paradise serious and blow themselves up in your face to get there.
Yes - yes they do, it is absolutely undeniable. Those that disagree are simply operating from an agenda.
No matter how you want to spin it - and we all know there are plenty who want it spun one way or another - people are being killed by Muslims for religious reasons.
Incredibly, the global media seems to want to find any excuse to look the other way. What on Earth is that all about? I thought the media were hungry for anything they could hype the shit out of? Surely Islamic violence is a gift to lazy reporters everywhere? What is going on here?
Change the word gay for "Jewish", "minority" or any number of things and see how much of a pathetic little bigot you are.
The rights of any group are a litmus test of the rights of all. We're just as human as you, thanks.
Well done - you were so eager to empty your spleen on someone that you completely missed the point. AK Marc is simply pointing out that suffrage from women is a fundamental issue as well. Not instead of.
I don't want to put words in his mouth but it seems he may have been suggesting that universal suffrage is probably 101 for societies looking to grow up. For nations without universal suffrage, this may be a more appropriate gauge of their progress than gay rights. Like most things, AK Marc's comment was merely a mirror for your own prejudices.
Gay rights, freedom of religious choice, freedom of speech.. these are all 102 challenges for a society as backwards as, say, Saudi Arabia.
Yes - self-censorship. The internal voice that says, or should say, "This is something that should not be said to another person, since I (ideally) don't want to be a jack ass".
Hah! Such lofty (and worthwhile) ideals crumble to dust in the terrible reality of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
No, they are parasites. For the term of gestation and for 20 or so years after birth at least.
I don't disagree with you. It does seem though that at least one clear benefit of a longer lifespan is the corresponding reduction of this (roughly) 25% overhead.
Dunno about you but as a 36-year-old I love talking to people over 50. The ones I'm talking about are wise, calm, respectful of others and often quick to spot potential problems etc. simply because of their life experience. I understand not all people are like this of course.
So, let's imagine that Humanity's age distribution shifted because of technological advances. One natural side-effect is that society would certainly enjoy the benefits of having wise and rational people around for much longer. That concept - having a generally wiser, more experienced population - is about the only way I can conceive of Humanity surviving its self-inflicted crises and turning its collective behaviour around.
It's almost enough to turn this bitter old misanthrope into an optimist.
I hate Apple and MS; Google I'm still a bit on the fence about but their massive amount of tracking and information-gathering plus ties to the NSA have made me move to using DuckDuckGo for all my searches lately. But as you said, I hate then in varying amounts, and MS is at the top of the list (though Apple has been rising a lot in recent years, mostly thanks to their patent trolling).
MS have earned their place at the top of a lot of people's lists through their iron dedication to unswervingly cunty behaviour. Apple's evil took a while to really come into focus for me (what can I say, I'm a slow learner) but Google that completely blindsided me. I just had no idea. I'm not ashamed to admit I bought into a good bit of their Geek-friendly kool-aid without going full fanboy. I even felt a tingle of hope when I read their "Don't be evil" motto back in the day.
So when I see MS complaining about Google fucking them over, I honestly don't care. It's like a Mafia boss whining about some rival boss screwing him over in a business deal; what comes around, goes around. If Google were fucking someone else over, I might care a little more, but because it's MS, who has done the same and much worse to so many other companies over the years, I can only laugh. If Google were fucking over users (the way MS has done for most of its existence), then it'd raise my Google hate-meter. But if Google wants to "do evil" to MS, that's really fine by me. Cry me a river, MS.
Yeah, I'm with you on that, too, and if you were to call it schadenfreude you'd be right. It's probably pretty immature of me to say this, but every punch and every kick that fatboy-fuckwit Ballmer receives from the market gives me a great deal of pleasure. That group of people are as vile as the Wall St. thieves that sunk the entire western world into the shitter only a couple of years ago to further fatten their already bulging pockets. If they were stoats I'd gladly drown them; they have bullied, thieved, cajoled and connived like the nastiest of organised criminal gangs and real people like you and I have paid a very high price for their greed.
People look at me funny when I describe myself as "single until death" and I accept that in a world of pair-bond[ing|ed] adults I kinda bring that upon myself.
I do find the spite quotient somewhat more manageable though.;-)
It's easy to hate Microsoft. It's easy to hate Apple. But hate Google and the fanboys can be just as vicious as Apple ones.
You're right and it makes no sense. I'm out of the closet on this one: I hate all three companies. I hate them in varying amounts and am quite happy with my position. For a variety of reasons we're all familiar with, Humans in groups of any description tend towards cuntiness. Add gobs of money to this equation and this is the result.
This is not a zero-sum game. Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Felchbook, Google: all are richly deserving of your derision and condemnation. Disapproving of one does not make you a fanboy for another. Here's to equal-opportunity hatred for our corporate thug^H^H^H^Hoverlords!
Hell at my place down in Florida, it took me nearly 2 years go get a live oak cut down. That was *after* it had been hit by lightening, caught on fire, was infested with ants, and was leaning on the neighbors house.
I feel for you, that's like some kind of horror story. Any idiot can see that ignoring a situation like that is a false economy, surely *somebody* on the council has had to deal with this problem in the past and understand the total cost in the long run...
Ugh, who am I kidding. Local body government is always the same, the crème de la crème of incompetence.
Population explosion is a major issue I agree. Thats why we have condoms and vasectomies. Both of which need to be utilized a lot more often
What I find challenging is the way population control isn't an issue in developed countries, because they're already developed. If only we could help African nations become developed, population control would take care of itself. Of course, they can't develop because their population and population growth is out of control.
I must be embarrassingly ignorant of Human history because I'm sure we must have solved this problem to become developed nations in the first place.
Thanks! As a sysadmin rather than a programmer, your thoughts and fyngyrz's reply were very interesting and highly informative.
Gah, when I re-read that it sounds like sarcasm. It's not! The hypotheticals as much as the real-world examples of stuff people work with is what keeps/. fresh for me.
Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.
So did mine, pissed me right off.
I gave up and went back to carving gibs from my ugly mug with blade shavers until one of my friends suggested that it can take a couple of weeks for the skin to get used to electric shavers.
I was skeptical - electric for me meant the gift of a million tiny skin infections so I wasn't exactly keen to revisit the experience. He said I needed to be patient (nothing new) and went to to suggest being *extremely* light and gentle for the first week or so, even if it meant an imperfect shave.
Amazingly the advice worked and now I shave absent-mindedly with no special care while I ssh into my boxes and check my morning e-mail. One thing I would add is to invest in a nice aftershave; firstly, I think that as an astringent it may act to close the pores (or some such thing) which is supposed to be good. Secondly, the bolt of pure blue-shot-with-white agony is strangely worth it in its own right, kinda like being slapped awake by a beautiful goddess possessing the most common superpower and wielding a dripping wet mackerel.
The way we do science, however, can be uncomfortably close to religion, with its own dogma, preachers and heathens that get in the way of the job at hand.
We all know Max Planck's rather wry quote that Science advances one funeral at a time. That isn't how Science was meant to work. As such I can certainly understand your frustration.
Some kind of sensor issue can lead to a big mess or maybe even 2 or more cars each makeing a move that leads to crash.
It's a legitimate fear but one would hope the controlling computer(s) would be taking lots of input to make decisions. I'd imagine that a faulty sensor might be detected and 'voted out' by the computers comparing internal results and working out that something was amiss. This is probably going to be expensive stuff, I seem to recall (correctly or incorrectly) that voting computers are part of the way modern aeroplanes do things. Like all things it will be paid for mostly by the early adopters I suppose.
It would be nice if current industry-standard flight control software from (say) Boeing or Airbus could be adapted as they have countless hours of production testing on that code; it would be a shame to have to start again just because we're using rubber instead of rudders.
The knuckle dragging idiots that make up 90% of humanity on this planet
Some do seem to become quite upset by these sort of comments. However if one takes off the rose glasses for a moment there's ample evidence for their validity.
Civilisation is a wonderful thing but it is inevitably doomed to failure. In a world - such as ours - where there are no consequences for stupidity, the stupid will out-fuck the smart. There are very few examples of non-stupid parents with six children families.
If only because sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality.
I thought your post was clearly tolerant rather than racist; the fact that you weren't screamed at by hordes of ACs suggests others understood too. That 'n' word sure does have the ability to cause plenty of uneasiness though..
Slashdot Mirror
The support of the US is the only thing keeping the simmering border conflicts from breaking out into open war.
I mostly agree but I'm sure Israel's demonstrably-competent military and accompanying nuclear arsenal must weigh into the decision somewhere. Israel has been involved in a number of local conflicts that the US simply wasn't present for. I seem to recall them holding their own pretty successfully and even bloodying the collective noses of invading forces for good measure.
(not trying to imply any support or otherwise for Israel)
'cause these loonies take the shit about paradise serious and blow themselves up in your face to get there.
Yes - yes they do, it is absolutely undeniable. Those that disagree are simply operating from an agenda.
No matter how you want to spin it - and we all know there are plenty who want it spun one way or another - people are being killed by Muslims for religious reasons.
Incredibly, the global media seems to want to find any excuse to look the other way. What on Earth is that all about? I thought the media were hungry for anything they could hype the shit out of? Surely Islamic violence is a gift to lazy reporters everywhere? What is going on here?
Score:5, Troll
Goodness me, did you just break Slashdot?!
Right, because gays aren't humans.
Change the word gay for "Jewish", "minority" or any number of things and see how much of a pathetic little bigot you are.
The rights of any group are a litmus test of the rights of all. We're just as human as you, thanks.
Well done - you were so eager to empty your spleen on someone that you completely missed the point. AK Marc is simply pointing out that suffrage from women is a fundamental issue as well. Not instead of.
I don't want to put words in his mouth but it seems he may have been suggesting that universal suffrage is probably 101 for societies looking to grow up. For nations without universal suffrage, this may be a more appropriate gauge of their progress than gay rights. Like most things, AK Marc's comment was merely a mirror for your own prejudices.
Gay rights, freedom of religious choice, freedom of speech .. these are all 102 challenges for a society as backwards as, say, Saudi Arabia.
Fuck I'm glad there's always a partisan idiot like you around to frame every situation in terms of Republican or Democrat.
From the perspective of the rest of the civilised world, both are utterly fucking barking mad.
Yes - self-censorship. The internal voice that says, or should say, "This is something that should not be said to another person, since I (ideally) don't want to be a jack ass".
Hah! Such lofty (and worthwhile) ideals crumble to dust in the terrible reality of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
What about the "Hans shot first" controversy?
I knew it! Those pesky Nazis were behind every evil deed in the last century!!
No, they are parasites. For the term of gestation and for 20 or so years after birth at least.
I don't disagree with you. It does seem though that at least one clear benefit of a longer lifespan is the corresponding reduction of this (roughly) 25% overhead.
Dunno about you but as a 36-year-old I love talking to people over 50. The ones I'm talking about are wise, calm, respectful of others and often quick to spot potential problems etc. simply because of their life experience. I understand not all people are like this of course.
So, let's imagine that Humanity's age distribution shifted because of technological advances. One natural side-effect is that society would certainly enjoy the benefits of having wise and rational people around for much longer. That concept - having a generally wiser, more experienced population - is about the only way I can conceive of Humanity surviving its self-inflicted crises and turning its collective behaviour around.
It's almost enough to turn this bitter old misanthrope into an optimist.
I hate Apple and MS; Google I'm still a bit on the fence about but their massive amount of tracking and information-gathering plus ties to the NSA have made me move to using DuckDuckGo for all my searches lately. But as you said, I hate then in varying amounts, and MS is at the top of the list (though Apple has been rising a lot in recent years, mostly thanks to their patent trolling).
MS have earned their place at the top of a lot of people's lists through their iron dedication to unswervingly cunty behaviour. Apple's evil took a while to really come into focus for me (what can I say, I'm a slow learner) but Google that completely blindsided me. I just had no idea. I'm not ashamed to admit I bought into a good bit of their Geek-friendly kool-aid without going full fanboy. I even felt a tingle of hope when I read their "Don't be evil" motto back in the day.
So when I see MS complaining about Google fucking them over, I honestly don't care. It's like a Mafia boss whining about some rival boss screwing him over in a business deal; what comes around, goes around. If Google were fucking someone else over, I might care a little more, but because it's MS, who has done the same and much worse to so many other companies over the years, I can only laugh. If Google were fucking over users (the way MS has done for most of its existence), then it'd raise my Google hate-meter. But if Google wants to "do evil" to MS, that's really fine by me. Cry me a river, MS.
Yeah, I'm with you on that, too, and if you were to call it schadenfreude you'd be right. It's probably pretty immature of me to say this, but every punch and every kick that fatboy-fuckwit Ballmer receives from the market gives me a great deal of pleasure. That group of people are as vile as the Wall St. thieves that sunk the entire western world into the shitter only a couple of years ago to further fatten their already bulging pockets. If they were stoats I'd gladly drown them; they have bullied, thieved, cajoled and connived like the nastiest of organised criminal gangs and real people like you and I have paid a very high price for their greed.
Mostly I guess the shrills and astroturfers
I think it was Calvin and Hobbes that gave us "If you can't get them with reason, go for volume!"
People look at me funny when I describe myself as "single until death" and I accept that in a world of pair-bond[ing|ed] adults I kinda bring that upon myself.
I do find the spite quotient somewhat more manageable though. ;-)
It's easy to hate Microsoft. It's easy to hate Apple. But hate Google and the fanboys can be just as vicious as Apple ones.
You're right and it makes no sense. I'm out of the closet on this one: I hate all three companies. I hate them in varying amounts and am quite happy with my position. For a variety of reasons we're all familiar with, Humans in groups of any description tend towards cuntiness. Add gobs of money to this equation and this is the result.
This is not a zero-sum game. Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Felchbook, Google: all are richly deserving of your derision and condemnation. Disapproving of one does not make you a fanboy for another. Here's to equal-opportunity hatred for our corporate thug^H^H^H^Hoverlords!
Yes, jeopardizing peoples lives, undercut long term diplomatic missions. That sure is the right thing.
So.. how's that whole 'critical thinking' thing working out for you then?
Hell at my place down in Florida, it took me nearly 2 years go get a live oak cut down. That was *after* it had been hit by lightening, caught on fire, was infested with ants, and was leaning on the neighbors house.
I feel for you, that's like some kind of horror story. Any idiot can see that ignoring a situation like that is a false economy, surely *somebody* on the council has had to deal with this problem in the past and understand the total cost in the long run...
Ugh, who am I kidding. Local body government is always the same, the crème de la crème of incompetence.
As a non-American, what happens in America is not your business or your problem.
So shove your opinions up your ass, motherfucker.
As a non-American being spied upon by America, it very much IS my business and my problem.
Population explosion is a major issue I agree. Thats why we have condoms and vasectomies. Both of which need to be utilized a lot more often
What I find challenging is the way population control isn't an issue in developed countries, because they're already developed. If only we could help African nations become developed, population control would take care of itself. Of course, they can't develop because their population and population growth is out of control.
I must be embarrassingly ignorant of Human history because I'm sure we must have solved this problem to become developed nations in the first place.
Don't underestimate the need for sex. If you are able to brush it off so easily, it's very possible that your genes are not going to make it.
With seven billion humans on the planet, I'm not so sure anyone is going to cry if my genes don't get passed on.
It's more likely that if you don't need it, you're not doing it right. ;)
There's a good chance you're right and I'm quite comfortable with that. :)
Thanks! As a sysadmin rather than a programmer, your thoughts and fyngyrz's reply were very interesting and highly informative.
Gah, when I re-read that it sounds like sarcasm. It's not! The hypotheticals as much as the real-world examples of stuff people work with is what keeps /. fresh for me.
Electric razors give me a rash. I can only shave every two days as it is.
So did mine, pissed me right off.
I gave up and went back to carving gibs from my ugly mug with blade shavers until one of my friends suggested that it can take a couple of weeks for the skin to get used to electric shavers.
I was skeptical - electric for me meant the gift of a million tiny skin infections so I wasn't exactly keen to revisit the experience. He said I needed to be patient (nothing new) and went to to suggest being *extremely* light and gentle for the first week or so, even if it meant an imperfect shave.
Amazingly the advice worked and now I shave absent-mindedly with no special care while I ssh into my boxes and check my morning e-mail. One thing I would add is to invest in a nice aftershave; firstly, I think that as an astringent it may act to close the pores (or some such thing) which is supposed to be good. Secondly, the bolt of pure blue-shot-with-white agony is strangely worth it in its own right, kinda like being slapped awake by a beautiful goddess possessing the most common superpower and wielding a dripping wet mackerel.
Yow!
Science is a fucking religion.
No, Science is not a religion.
The way we do science, however, can be uncomfortably close to religion, with its own dogma, preachers and heathens that get in the way of the job at hand.
We all know Max Planck's rather wry quote that Science advances one funeral at a time. That isn't how Science was meant to work. As such I can certainly understand your frustration.
I wish to table the motion that Samantha Wright be officially recognised as a Slashdot Treasure.
That is all.
Some kind of sensor issue can lead to a big mess or maybe even 2 or more cars each makeing a move that leads to crash.
It's a legitimate fear but one would hope the controlling computer(s) would be taking lots of input to make decisions. I'd imagine that a faulty sensor might be detected and 'voted out' by the computers comparing internal results and working out that something was amiss. This is probably going to be expensive stuff, I seem to recall (correctly or incorrectly) that voting computers are part of the way modern aeroplanes do things. Like all things it will be paid for mostly by the early adopters I suppose.
It would be nice if current industry-standard flight control software from (say) Boeing or Airbus could be adapted as they have countless hours of production testing on that code; it would be a shame to have to start again just because we're using rubber instead of rudders.
The knuckle dragging idiots that make up 90% of humanity on this planet
Some do seem to become quite upset by these sort of comments. However if one takes off the rose glasses for a moment there's ample evidence for their validity.
Civilisation is a wonderful thing but it is inevitably doomed to failure. In a world - such as ours - where there are no consequences for stupidity, the stupid will out-fuck the smart. There are very few examples of non-stupid parents with six children families.
What is Mars' shoe size?
OK, so I'm off-topic and wasting everyone's time here and I do apologise:
I can't believe it but I just saw correct (advanced) apostrophe usage on the 'dot. Life on other planets doesn't seem quite so unlikely now.
And on spelling optional day too!
I fucked up I guess.
If only because sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality.
I thought your post was clearly tolerant rather than racist; the fact that you weren't screamed at by hordes of ACs suggests others understood too. That 'n' word sure does have the ability to cause plenty of uneasiness though..